Artists

Rosemarie Trockel

Born: 1952, Schwerte, GermanyLives and Works: Cologne, Germany

Rosemarie Trockel's eclectic range of media and techniques encompasses ceramics, knitted-wool "paintings" and clothing, films and videos, sculptural objects, photographs, and collages, in the process of interrogating cultural tropes relating to notions of gender, domesticity, the body, and humans' relationship to animals. She frequently alludes to domestication in her work, as evident in her ceramic sculptures, clothing, kitchen iconography, and houses for domesticated animals. These works suggest an ambivalent relationship to perceived "feminine myths" as well as an active resistance to the traditionally male-dominated German art world from which she has emerged. Trockel's recent ceramic sculptures include platinum-plated wall reliefs and floor pieces. landscapian shroud of my mother (2008), a low platform of glazed ceramic and steel evocative of a white cityscape or architectural model is punctuated by a black shroud. The work presents an abstracted, disconcerting image of a flattened human form. Here the body has evaporated and merged into the landscape, leaving only a piece of cloth as evidence of an earlier incarnation.